Swift IV Presolicitation Conference Transcript.pdf

SWIFT IV PRE-SOLICITATION CONFERENCE

JUNE 20, 2012

9:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.

1/26/12

PRESENTERS

Cristina Sylvia, Contracting officer, M/OAA/DCHA

Rob Jenkins, Director, DCHA/OTI

Nealin Parker, Deputy Director, DCHA/OTI

Stephen Lennon, Chief, Field Programs Division, DCHA/OTI

Chris Maness, Program Manager, Program Office, DCHA/OTI

Sharon Wharton-Smith, Contracting Officer, M/OAA/DCHA

Teneshia Alston, Senior Program Specialist, USAID/OSDBU

AGENDA ITEM: INTRODUCTION

Good morning. I would like to welcome all of you to this pre-solicitation conference for the Support Which Implements Fast

Transitions IV Indefinite Quantity Contract, IQC. My name is

Cristina Sylvia, contracting officer for USAID‟s Office of

Acquisition and Assistance.

I want to start off this conference by making the following four points. Formats and explanation discussed here today do not qualify as the terms of a potential solicitation. Number two; this pre-solicitation conference does not commit USAID to issue a request for proposal. And once this conference is completed, no private inquires will be addressed to the USA government about this potential IQC. Third, for the question and answer sessions we will be reading questions submitted on the index cards supplied.

Questions and answers will only be specific to the draft Scope of

Work. There might be questions that we will not be able to answer at this time. Once we have gone through all the questions on the index cards, we will then open it up for any follow-up questions to any of the answers we‟ve provided if time permits. If time doesn‟t permit, please keep in mind that should we post the RFP on

FedBizOps, there will be an opportunity to ask questions at that time. Number four, a transcript of this conference will be posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website. This transcript will contain a copy of questions and answers and a written record of the conference. With that said, I would like to introduce you to the team who will be handling this procurement.

Here with me today is Sharon Wharton, our Contracting Officer, and she is the lead for this IQC; Chad Mills, Contracting Officer, Alex

Escobar, Contract Specialist, and Kevin Armstrong. We also have with us today the Office of Transition Initiative, OTI, Director, Rob Jenkins who will provide you with an introduction to OTI. With that said, let me turn it over to Rob Jenkins.

AGENDA ITEM: WELCOME

Thank you, Cris, very much. Good morning everybody. I am extremely excited to be here today and it‟s great to see so many old faces; or faces I‟ve known a long time I should say. And so many new faces or faces I haven‟t seen before. I would love to spend all morning here; unfortunately, there is an event that I have to attend. And while I consider myself a passionate bureaucrat, I‟m enough of a bureaucrat to go to things that my bosses think are more important than this. But to me, there‟s nothing more important than this.

This represents a huge step forward and a milestone in the history of OTI.

OTI gets criticized often for being too proud. I prefer audacious, but it is valid criticism, though, I think we have a lot to be proud about. And one of the things that we‟re most proud about, that I‟m personally most proud about is a unique culture. It‟s a culture that in Secretary Clinton‟s QDDR was held up as a model for other offices in State and USAID to emulate. And it‟s hard to boil down culture into a few phrases or a few terms, but let me try.

It‟s a culture of innovation. It‟s a culture of challenging what you think is the truth. It‟s a culture of learning. We consider ourselves a learning organization before that phrase became something that everyone started using. When Dr. Raj Shah was testifying before the Congressional Commission on Wartime

Contracting, he was asked about OTI. What made it different? And he said, “Their culture.” And Raj went on to say “I spent a lot of time looking at this and the most important part of their culture, I think, is the SWIFT mechanism;” and in fact it is.

Now you‟re going to hear a lot today about our business model. Our business model is based on SWIFT. About eighty five to ninety percent of our business in a given year goes through SWIFT. What makes SWIFT different? In a word, “Partnership.”

Now USAID talks a lot about partnership. Sometimes it doesn‟t seem like a partnership, maybe. Even to us sometimes might not seem quite a partnership. And when our partners remind us that we look like just another donor, it hurts. Because when we‟re at our best, it‟s not us and our partners, it‟s all of us together; and you‟ll hear about our one team approach, which is extremely important to

us. We‟re a very small office trying to do very big things.

Without partners, we cannot do anything. We use the term, and I think you‟ll see it later; our partners are a force multiplier of ourselves. In the right programs where it really works well, there is no separation. So we cannot implement without partners. We cannot implement without SWIFT. So today marks the first step in the future of OTI, going years on out.

Now what is it that we are implementing together? It‟s simple; we try to change the world. That‟s it. And we‟ve attracted an amazing team of very motivated fantastic people. And our partners, again, are an extension of ourselves. We‟re looking for dedicated people who just want to change the world. Now you‟ll see our mission statement at the very beginning is quite bold and we start with, “Our mission is to advance US foreign policy.” And we take that very seriously. It‟s a huge responsibility. So in the partnership, we do have to call the shots; but we know the ideas are not going to come from us, they‟re going to come from our partners and our local partners.

Now our unofficial mission statement that I use is that, “OTI makes a critical difference in the most critical places at the most critical times.” Our job is to assault the impossible to make it possible and then consider it achieved.” Our job is to go into the darkest places and shed some light. Our job is to find places that need hope and provide it. Our job is to provide time when time is needed, but it‟s a very short commodity.

So looking forward the next few years, we‟re just looking for people to join our team, to join us in the simple endeavor of changing the word and to make a future together. That‟s it. Thank you. Thanks for caring. Thanks for coming today to learn more about us. Thanks for consider joining us in this grand challenge and have a great day. Sorry I cannot stay.

AGENDA ITEM: OTI BUSINESS MODEL

The last time I did this I tried to be funny and that is not a good way forward. Just to give me a little bit of a sense of the room, can you raise your hand if you have worked with OTI before or you have experience with us. Great. So this is going to be a lot of review and you‟ve heard a lot of this before. It‟s a much longer slide deck than I have time to talk through, but it turns out that in addition to be Deputy Director what I am is the vehicle for basically getting this stuff on the record and then it‟ll be emailed to you. [Correction: The transcript will be posted on FedBizOps. It will not be sent via email.] So there are a couple of slides with a lot of words on it that I‟m probably going to go through really fast.

So, who are we? And what I‟m going to do is talk about who we are, where we work, when we work, what we do, why we do it and how we do

it. So who are we? We were created in 1994; and 1994 is kind of important, but more important is 1989. There was a political transition in Eastern Europe that some of you may have heard about -

- I‟m assuming all of you at the end of the Cold War -- in which the

United States Government felt like it did not have the right mechanism to respond quickly to a political transition.

So OTI was created. As the way with bureaucracy, it takes a couple of years. So in 1994 we got OTI created from what I like to call the rib of OFDA. So it is fitting that we, today, find ourselves in

OFDA facilities. We still have a very strong partnership with them in part because we are both sort of rapid mechanisms. And to deal with humanitarian as to deal with political transitions you can imagine there is overlap in there. You‟re going to get this slide so, again, I‟m going to jump through a couple of things. We‟re going to talk about most of this throughout.

50 engagements, $2 billion since 1994. That‟s a lot of money, but each of our programs as compared to broader USAID programs is actually much smaller. And each of our projects [Note: In this case projects refers to small, quick impact activities implemented through subcontracts or sub-awards under a contract or agreement], as compared to broader USAID programs, in general is average

$30,000, average two to three months for implementation. So what we‟re doing is in an environment that‟s changing dramatically, we‟re making smaller investments that take smaller amounts of time and we‟re doing that in rapid successions so that we can actually change our plan as we‟re moving. We will talk about that a little bit more. Again, our whole program timeline is usually over two to three years.

This is the legislation of our mandate. I‟m not going read it, but

Rob went through it. Basically the legislation allows us to work with democratic institutions, basic infrastructure, fostering the peaceful resolution to conflict. And it is this last one that I think we had expanded to encompass a huge number of things, because the peaceful resolution of conflict for us is a non-sectorial experience. And what I mean by that is reconciliation programs that are dialog programs is not enough to end conflict. Education programs, ecomanic programs, things that address the heart of conflict. We think all of those are part of this peaceful resolution of conflict.

So OTI‟s mission and Rob referenced it already, being in the most critical places at the most critical times to make a critical difference. The “how” of that, the fast, flexible and short-term assistance is something that I think implicates our partners significantly. We usually turn around from award to startup conference within two to three days. And then everything after that has a similar timeline.

Has anybody here every run for office? No? Not a lot of interacting this morning. So, in eight grade I ran for eight-grade president and I lost; and I like to think that‟s because I didn‟t have OTI in my corner. I have experience working at OTI. I have experience in our program and leadership as on the timeline of a campaign and with many of the same mentalities; where you need to be able to expand and contract both your staffing and your mechanisms very quickly. You have to have a culture of entrepreneurism because you don‟t know what‟s going to come next. And you need to have your feelers out to figure that out. So this is where the learning comes in for us in a very very big way.

Intensive management of staff. So what this is is we know we‟re in a changing environment; and I‟m going to talk about this a lot more at the end. But we‟re in a changing environment and the way that we are able to be so flexible is that we consider our implementing partners an extension of ourselves and their feeding information back into the US Government so that we can keep those who are highest in making civilian decisions in US Government informed and we‟re able to change our program very quickly that way. The action learning, real-time reporting and innovative M&E, I just think this is polling. There is a lot more to it, but perception surveys are a huge part of the way we do our monitoring and evaluation. And again, putting the framework of running a campaign. Our campaign is based on trying to get peace, democracy and transition achieved in a country rather than the election of a particular official. But both in timeline and in culture, adding mentality and even in a lot of the mechanisms that we‟re using both to expand our funding and our staffing, have that kind of campaign feel.

So another illustration of this is the financial piece. How is OTI funded? So from 2001 to 2012, OTI has basically had the same funding. It‟s about $50 to $60 million of TI funds, Transition

Initiative funds. So we have our own pot of funding that we are given and it stayed pretty steady from 2001 to 2012. But the size of OTI has actually changed dramatically.

Unlike most parts of the US Government, we are fundraisers throughout the year. So most people get money from Congress and that‟s the money they work with. OTI uses the money that we‟re given to leverage other funds; and there are a number of different pots of that funding. But it is predominately economic support funds that come out of missions abroad although we do implement complex crisis funds that go through our bureau (DCHA), the Election of Political Processes funds that come out the DRG Center. There are a number of others like those.

So the first time that we had a big influx of cash was in 1998 for a four-year program in Indonesia quite a coup for OTI and I wasn‟t there for it; but as I understand people freaked out and just saw this as the end of the OTI culture as we knew it because we were expanding to new heights of $52 million over four years. A few years later we had another influx in Afghanistan. This is the first

Afghanistan program. Then we had an even larger program in Iraq.

This flux continues for OTI such that in 2010 we were implementing over $400 million, again, but in one year. That was mostly the earthquake in Haiti in the early days of 2010, on top of Afghanistan program.

Right now we have 13 countries programs. This is actually slightly out of date. We have $56.7 million in TI funds. But this is a significant difference in terms of its authorities, but it is only used in some geographic areas and then $250 to $350 million of other funding. You may ask how do I not know my budget within $100 million. The answer to that is that we continue to fund raise so I cannot tell you how much we will implement by the end of this fiscal year.

So how are we organized? Instead of going through this I was going to give the highlights. We have the Field Programs Division and

Stephen Lennon who is in the back of the room; he‟s the Chief of our

Field Programs Division. He oversees what I think of as the geographically-based programs in our office. So you have the

Africa, Asia, Middle East and Af/Pak and Latin American & Caribbean teams. This maps onto the broader agency and it is one of the ways that we try to integrate into USAID. Media and Bullpen are two pieces of basically Surge that are utility to our geographically-based program.

Then we have a new transition support unit, which is working with missions through OTI like programming. But again, that is geographically based. It is working with specific countries in its entirety. The Operations and Management Division supports logistically all of these field-based programs. And I have to say that our entire office is very much focused on trying to support this field program‟s division.

So Operations and Management, Finance and Travel, Information and

Technology, all these pieces are in support of having our field programs work. And now we have the Program Learning and Innovation.

And I think this launch here is helpful for this module. I think of this the way that I think of pillar bureaus, which is to say pieces of our agency or pieces of our office that support every part of the geographic bureaus.

So Monitoring and Evaluation is going to be important to every single one of these. And if you pull it out as a specific topic then you can actually aggregate some of the lessons that are in there. And that is true of a lot of these things; GIU being our mapping. OTI anywhere being a system of knowledge management that basically put our lessons in one place and then it rolls back out to the field. Obviously budgeting is important for all of us. Each of these also has a Bullpen. The reason for that being that the

Bullpens are -- and Bullpen is a Surge capacity, and I will get into that a little bit more in a second. The reason being that these

Bullpens hold the specific skills of the entity that they are attached to; so instead of having just one big Bullpen we make sure that our Management Division Bullpen, which is probably ex Executive

Officers from missions. Our Executive Officers are attached to our

Management Division and can sort of filter this.

The staffing piece: In Washington we have about -- these numbers are constantly changing -- we have about 88-90 staff in Washington.

Most are full-time US Personal Services Contractors. Then we have the Bullpen that I talked about. This is our Surge capacity. What we do with these folks is that we put them on a contract for a year and say, “Welcome to the family, we promise to give you absolutely no work.” And then if we do use them, we pay them for the time that they work. And they can work almost up to full-time, but actually not quite. And some of these people are in Washington and some of them are living the good live in Rio, Colorado, so not a bad gig.

Except for the maybe we won‟t pay you, because maybe you won‟t work thing.

Then we have 61 staff that are all around the world and I know you know where would be the place that we have the largest number of OTI staff. Afghanistan, yes, that‟s right. So in Afghanistan we use to have 50 percent of our staff there. We have a little bit less because we had fewer Expats there right now, but it‟s still the place where we have the largest number of our staff overseas.

That‟s between 175 and 200 OTI staff.

Then we have 121 partner Expat staff. And the reason that I put this to you this way is that this is the way that we feel about your staff. And what that means is that you are a part of our meetings.

It means that we have a lot more interaction. Part of your Expat staff and even just the ones in the field are the senior management team with our team and there is joint responsibility for what happen, so 121 partner Expat staff. We say that we‟re a field-driven organization. If you‟re looking at just the people that OTI hires, we don‟t have enough people to be field driven. It just wouldn‟t be possibly.

So you get these partner staff and then you get the local staff.

Then you start seeing how our office can be field driven. We start paying a lot more attention to what‟s happening here. And the way that I think about the distinction is that we do implement foreign policy, but that is at a policy level. And then, how do you implement that so that it makes sense in a local context? It has to be driven by the knowledge of the local partner staff so they are right until proven wrong vis-a-vis the Expat staff in the country, and the Expat staff in the country is right until proven wrong, need to be logical. It is a model that is fundamental to the operation of our program far more than that even is the local partner staff.

There isn‟t even a number here because the number is large.

Where and when? Unfortunately it is a little bit hard to see this map. These are, in red, our active programs; in green, our former programs. There are some programs that should be some lovely shade of brown because they are both former and active programs. There are a couple of places that we have been in a number of times, Democratic Republic of Congo we‟ve gone to three times. As I mentioned, Afghanistan had an Afghanistan one and now has the next iteration of that. You can see, though, there are 13 countries in red right now. The ones that started this past year were Libya, Tunisia and Cote d‟Ivoire. So there was a response to the Arab

Spring. We also shifted our programming in Lebanon and Yemen. Both of our programs, though, in some ways, not in the logistic way but in the meta-strategy way, we have two new programs there as well.

So that was our offices response to the Arab Spring. In Cote d‟Ivoire there was electoral violence that ended and we are working with Ouattara’s government in the political transition there.

How do we decide which countries to go into? Rob said already, is it important to US national interest? Our office believes AID is political period and we make no bones about that. We see that as an influx of funding, is a tool that has power implications. AID changes the power dynamics in a country. It has that political element to it. We also implement US foreign policy and say sometimes that we are an office that works on wants, not on needs.

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the political dynamics in a country to be able to implement that foreign policy.

Is there a window of opportunity? And the reason that this is important is, while for me personally I find the leverage of OTI to be vast and impressive, in terms of what it takes to achieve a positive transition, it is actually quite small. So for that reason and the fact that real transition does not happen by an external entity having an opinion one way or another, but by organic change, if you‟re looking for that transition to end in some kind of democracy, we need to be able to latch onto something happening organically in the country. We need to have a window of opportunity and we find that our model works very well to leverage.

So what we are looking for is something; the end of a war, the implementation of a new constitution, a political transition like we saw in the Arabs Spring. Those are the kinds of opportunities that

OTI is looking for.

Can OTI‟s involvement significantly increase the chances of successful transition? So is OTI the right tool; because you can have something that‟s important, there can be a transition and OTI is not necessarily the right tool. The reason that that often happens is that there is another tool there that can do the same job. So we are not, for example, in Somalia. Somalia has undoubtedly a need for flexible funding. So what we did was work with the regional mission in Kenya to establish a mechanism that was

OTI-like. It is actually run by a former OTI staff person. But OTI itself is not there; because we do not need to be, there is another mechanism.

And is the operating environment sufficiently stable? The operation environment is sufficiently stable is a criteria that we added more recently with respect to Afghanistan and other CPC countries.

The desired effects. Again, you are going to get these slides if you go to FedBizOpps so I will move on. The important thing here is that we are working on not just doing development, but we are working to try to make sure that we are achieving a peaceful democratic transition. So success for us looks like highlighting the peace dividends, whatever sector we‟re working in. It looks like working productively together. It is hard to measure some of these things and this is why the perception surveys end up being so critical. But what is important for us is that we do a lot of things like build schools, like build retaining walls. Like we removed rubble from Port-au-Prince where the goal is not the removal of rubble, the goal is to be able to have a government that can stand up and speak in front of its people and show real improvement from the earthquake that happened months before. So it is the “why” not the “what”.

A couple of illustrative activities here; at the top, this is a market. In Kenya we had gone in after electoral violence. And there were people around the Burnt Forest area and we rebuilt markets. We rebuilt markets because they were a place where multiple people would come work together and that had a symbolic importance. We then switched the goals of our programming after it became clear that they were going to have a new constitution. And we started working on the referendum for that constitution; and then on the elections that were subsequent.

So that is both an illustration of the activities that we do and an illustration of how we can change what the goal of our program is fairly quickly. The cell tower down here, this is an example from

Liberia where the Office of Transition Initiatives took sides. The side we took was in support of the unique administration of Ellen

Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia where we were supportive of her administration, that sort of nascent government, post conflict. She said that she would do two things. She said that she would get the light turned on in the country within a hundred days, which is a very hard thing to do by herself. So OTI was instrumental in making sure that that was possible.

The other thing that we do a lot of is recognizing that getting the word out, getting the voice of leadership out in transitions can be very difficult. So we have done a lot with strategic communications, radio. And it is not just the word out from the

Center, but messages that are important for reconciliation. In this corner here we have done livelihood work. This is an illustration from Colombia. Again, success looks like positive attitude changes, not just -- not that it is just a just -- but not just a school, it would be the changes we are looking in perceptions (File 96 30m52s).

OTI has a pretty quick assessment phase comparatively. We send a couple of people in. We try to make sure that they get out of the

Capital because you as well know, a lot of time a lot of it is very centric around the Capital and there is a whole other world out there that has a very different story to tell, but it‟s short.

We come back and we go for a go/no go decision. Are we going to go into the country? When we say we‟re going to go into the country, we have to meet our basic criteria, but we‟re not looking for a strategy. You do not need to know what you‟re going to do two years from now. In fact, as people who are bidding, if you told us what you would do two years from now we would guess you missed the point.

So, we say that we‟re going to go into the country and we‟re going to figure out what is the most important catalytic thing that we can do at that time. We then act. We then land. We start doing grants. We expand our network. We try to use those first grants for a lot of things. One of them is figuring out who else we should be talking to. Once we have some grants we can do an assessment.

And the assessment has a lot of different pieces to it that I‟ll go into in a second. But figuring out are they working. Are the grants that we‟re doing adding up to something more important and something that is also catalytic for the country and then we can adapt.

The graphic doesn‟t go like that, but a little bit like a funnier dance there. Where there‟s acting there‟s assessment, there‟s adapting that kind of goes in circles. But one of the things that we do is look not just at the activity level where you‟re doing constant monitoring and evaluation. And the monitoring you‟re doing at the activity level is okay, we said we were going to build a school, did we build a school? Did we go on time? Are there lessons that we can learn from the operations and how that works.

Then, all of those schools that we‟re building are we looking at it in a more aggregated fashion? Are those programs working? Do we have bigger things that we need to look at the strategy there? Then ultimately there is a third level, which is the strategic level where we try to incorporate the context analysis of the country.

So we do a series of grants. Each individual grant adds up to this program level where it‟s bigger than hope. We‟re doing it right, it‟s greater than the sum of its parts at the program level and then it fits within a broad strategic context. Which means that we need multiple tools to be able to do this. Again, on the activity level we have our database. And the database is an extensive, extensive, extensive database of the grant activities and monitoring and evaluation where it lies in the GPS. It allows us to plot what we‟re doing on maps and we can use other data, overlay that, figure out are we doing our programs in the right places; our other data goes from -- in the context of Haiti -- where was the greatest amount of destruction; are we doing our programs in those areas, to where is there insecurity and are we addressing that insecurity, using that as a baseline over time; or transitioning that to a web-based database with much of the same functionality, but an easier user interface.

At the program level we have analysis of cluster programs to figure out if the overall approach is working. We also have a program management review process. And again -- I feel like I keep saying this, but -- I will talk about that in just a bit. Then at the broader political analysis level, part of our program review process brings some of that in. We also have looked at doing perception surveys, bringing in more political context in a number of different ways.

This is the part where I‟m going to talk about the program performance management processes. Over the life of an OTI program, as I mentioned we have an initial assessment, two to five staff, two to three weeks. We get a go or no go. For the purposes of this exercise, we got to go. We have five days to tell Congress that we‟re going. It‟s not a CN. It is a report to Congress where we technically don‟t have to wait, and we do in the context of Haiti where we had about a 24-hour turnaround. But in most cases since

Congress is important we try to let them know and give them the space to be aware of that.

Simultaneously, we start doing all the other preparation necessary.

This five-day report is -- it needs to be five days before we give money to a beneficiary. Start up workshop: It is two to three days after we decide a bid. It is a two to three day conference with all of the critical staff on your bid in Washington DC between the partner and OTI. This is all in month one. Month two, five eight, these are kind of illustrative. Every quarter we have what we call a strategic review session. The strategic review session is everyone from the driver up to the head of the program, once a year bringing in outside facilitation and representatives of Washington so that we are all on the same page, but predominately with people in the fields so that they are the one who are driving the implementation for strategy.

A systems review or a management review, whatever the word is that we‟re using now, is approximately six months after a start. And what we discovered is that in most programming you‟ve got people who get on the ground and they do remarkable things in a very short period of time. There is never enough time in programming generally to sort of look at the fundamentals, step back and do a review. So we just have basically mandated that at the six-month mark we‟re just going to do a little bit of a deep dive of, are we doing our processes correctly, is the communication working, do we need to shift our staffing plan? And we found that that actually helps with the rest of the implementation of the programming.

So its two weeks usually of people who have done a lot of these management reviews or a lot of these systems reviews. Continuing strategic review sessions, then a program performance review. This in some ways is an extension of the systems review, but looking also at the impact of our programs. So it has no political analysis to

it. It involves interviewing more significantly external to the program. The perception of our program becomes very important rather than the guts of how we operate and work. It is two to four, usually OTI staff, but often we would bring somebody in -- or periodically we will bring somebody in from other -- for example our policy shops so that they have a sense of how actually our program works and also they work on monitoring and evaluation of various other things that could be useful to our program. So it is also a way for us to get new ideas into how we operate.

They assess the program for -- in the longest case I think it was about six weeks. But in general it‟s a sort of two to three weeks, sometimes up to a month review process. This is at the beginning of a program. Almost as you get up and running, that moment when you‟re like, I think we got it. I think we have the management in place, I think we know how to do the system. I think we‟ve got some really good grants and I know we‟ve got some really good staff. You get a phone call that says it‟s time to move out, we‟re closing down. Which I know is frustrating to us and I can only assume it is doubly frustrating for our partners.

Again, in that two to three year window we‟d like to start talking about handover. Eighteen months or more we have a closeout. So you start finalizing your handover plan. Maybe that‟s to the mission, maybe that‟s to local entities. You continue to have PPRs and then there‟s closeout planning. And again, all of these processes continue. Our final evaluation process, we‟re actually working at brining back so that it is something happening a little bit more over time, not just at the end.

And finally, the last sort of event is after all the keys are turned and the lights are out and everyone goes home we bring everybody back. We bring a number of key staff back to Washington to have an

After Exit Review (AER). What did we do well? What else could we learn? Part of being able to have a SWIFT mechanism is that we assume that we would be able to work with our partners again. And so these lessons learned are critical not just for the program that we just did, the programming in that country, but also the programs that we will do in the future.

So we talked about this with the staffing previously, but this is basically just to note that in most places we have two to three OTI staff and a much larger group of Expat staff. So that 380 implementing partner staff -- 380 local staff in Afghanistan to 16

OTI staff.

I talked about the database. It is the fundamental way that we keep track of the activities that we do, that we do programming management. It‟s one of the tools that we have for strategy. It is another way that if you put information in the database in the field then we can answer a lot of questions in Washington without making people in the field have to answer those questions.

Managing the Contract: So between the OTI Country Rep and the implementing partner Chief of Party, there is technical oversight, coordination and a whole lot of communication. We usually brand that as a senior management team in countries so that both on the

OTI side and implementing partner side, those folks are all integrated into conversations with the rest of the staff in strategic decisions. We also all know that both for the OTI staff and the implementing partner staff they are teamed with management to headquarters.

So what we have here is a situation where these people are talking, these people are talking and those people are talking and you are counting on these people to get along seamlessly. What happens if they don‟t get along seamlessly? You know what, you bump it up your chains (of management), and if you bump it up your chains and these guys aren‟t talking to each other then you are likely to get two different decisions. So we‟ve come up with what we called four corners. Which are methods of communication in which you make sure every one of these corners are interfacing. In Afghanistan they go from four to twelve corners, but everyone who is in these corners are on the phone call together, on the email together, having communication that happen simultaneously.

In the field you have the OTI Rep and the implementing partner. As

I mentioned, we have what we call a one-team approach where these folks are all part of senior management. And the project development local staff should experience this as what we call a one-team approach. Lots of communication, implementation determines impact, respect for goals, etcetera, etcetera. Thank you so much.

AGENDA ITEM: BREAK

Okay and right now we have a ten minute break. We‟re slightly more than ten minutes, so we have a 12 minute break. Again, as was stated by Ms. Sylvia earlier, questions will be taken on note cards and question and answers will be at the end at 11:00. So if you have questions please be writing those on the cards because we‟re going to organize them and figure out who responds and how we can complete the session. Okay? Thank you.

Now is the time for Stephen Lennon who is the Chief of our Field

Program Division to do some country examples of recent notes of our

OTI programs and try to put that into context of what Nealin just talked about. Just to followup and try to show the country‟s program and how we‟ve actually used that business model.

AGENDA ITEM: COUNTRY EXAMPLES

We‟re going to have a loop of some photos behind me showing some photographs from our Colombia program and our Kosovo program. I have to refer to my notes for numbers. I was here in Kosovo from 1999 to

2001. We did 696 activities. It was about $27 million that we spent in Kosovo. While we were in Colombia from 2007 to 2011, so it was a bit of a longer program. In Colombia we did 935 activities for just under $50 million dollars. We chose to speak about these two programs, first of all because they are closed, they are not current programming. Secondly because they were very very different.

Although they may seem to you, as I describe them, very similar. A lot of the activities were very similar, but the objectives were very different.

In Kosovo, OTI went in. I‟m very familiar with that program because

I was the Chief of Party for the implementing partner. OTI went in just as the Serbs were rolled out of Kosovo and the conflict was ending. The UN and the KFOR was going in. The intent was to show some peace dividends to the population and try to sew up difficulties between Serbs and Albanians and help the UN get started.

So we worked throughout Kosovo. We had seven offices. It was, I believe, the biggest OTI program at the time. And that‟s where our database began. That‟s where a lot of the methodology that OTI talks about today really began. A lot of the stuff that OTI talks about and Nealin presented began really to take form in Kosovo. It was a fantastic program. What we did was work -- and you‟ll see some photos of some of the groups that we worked with. There a classroom with a lot of people in it and they look very engaged. That was one of our community engagement committees where OTI staff and implementing partner staff would talk to these committees, learn what the general population wanted. It was very democratic in orientation. It took a lot of the best practices from the development community and applied it. That‟s the photo I‟m talking about. I think I was in that room when that discussion was happening.

This not only allowed us to come up with good ideas, but it allowed the embassy to know what was going on throughout Kosovo. We had better information than anyone else in the US Government and we used

it. You get programming and to inform US policy.

Oh, let me just correct Nealin on one thing. You‟ll see in that photograph that she referred to from Liberia that was actually from

Kosovo. So it‟s one slide that was there. And it was a great thing.

We actually restored these cell phone communications in Kosovo through some of our programs. Some of our activities were done very very community oriented; give chairs to a high school. And others were very, very big projects like restoring the cell phone communication for all of Kosovo.

Now we‟ve talked a bit about Colombia. Colombia, a lot of small projects just like Kosovo, a lot of engagement with the community, but it was a counter insurgency program. I truly believe that OTI does the best counter insurgency work on the civilian side in US

Government. And if you read counter insurgency doctrine it‟s 80 percent civilian. And we did it in Colombia. When the FARC started losing ground to the Colombian military, the US Government said my

God we need to do something about this. Our policy to date has been very much designed as a war on drugs and helping the military, now areas are opening up, what can we do? OTI was asked to go in and we did. And we didn‟t go in as the US Government. In Kosovo everything was branded, USAID. In Colombia, nothing was branded. Is that correct Chris? Nothing was branded USAID. It was all -- that‟s right soccer balls from the Colombian Government, Accion Social. We had a couple of different brands.

What we did was create entities that looked, smelled, acted like they were the Colombian Government and we worked very very closely with the Colombian Government and the Colombian military to project their presence. Expert counter insurgency work and very very successful.

Colombian Government now holds much more ground than it did at the beginning of 2007, and it is in areas that it hadn‟t been in for decades. It is taking our model and building an OTI within the

Colombian Government now and putting real money towards it; more money than we had, I believe to continue our activities.

These activities are really grounded in local populations, but we designed the optic, or the profile of our program, to be appropriate to the context. So in Kosovo it was the International Community, KFOR and UNMIK coming in, showing the Albanians and the Serbians that they were cared about by outside powers (File 96 56m04s).

In Colombia very very different. Your Government is returning; your

Government is here for the first time and is using transparent mechanisms and real community-based activism to respond to your needs and wants.

We talked a little bit about the activities there. We use our partners to really go out and learn what‟s going on. They come back to us with activity ideas. And as quickly as we can we turn it around. We can do activities very very quickly. We ask all of our partners to use our database to present that information to us and we approve the activities. OTI is involved in every single activity that is done on the ground. Whether it‟s $500 being spent on a poster campaign or whether it‟s a -- I think our biggest activity ever was $1.8 million to reconstruct a temporary building in Haiti recently.

But the involvement of OTI is very very different from working with

USAID and any another donor -- I‟ve worked with most all donors that

I can think us as an implementing partner. And working with OTI was remarkable in the flexibility they gave me by owning the responsibility for failure. So when a grant goes bad, when an activity fails, OTI shares your responsibility in that failure. I take that very seriously and OTI takes that very seriously. We want you to be able to take risks, less risk averse and in your activities push the envelope and try to do what is possible.

I think that I‟ll end it there Chris. We can answer questions on these two programs or anything else that comes to mind as well.

Thank you.

AGENDA ITEM: SWIFT IV STATEMENT OF WORK

This session is talking more about the SWIFT IV Scope of Work. I‟m not going to go into great detail about every little piece of SWIFT

IV Scope of Work. What I‟m going to try to do is actually tie things from what you heard in the business model and what you‟ve heard from

Stephen back to what‟s in the Scope of Work.

So this is general information, just sort of it‟s all there. The ceiling for the SWIFT IV Scope of Work is $2.5 billion. That ordering period, the period in which we can actually do task orders, that is five years. In addition, there is an additional three years at the end for performance of contracts that have been awarded in that ordering period. So it‟s eight years of total period performance, five years ordering period.

The structure: It‟s a little different from what we have had before.

If you‟ve looked at our SWIFT IV -- so this is the fourth time we‟ve done this. If you look at our SWIFT process, our SWIFT IQC has been evolving over time. The first one, SWIFT I was very different from

SWIFT II, which was very different from SWIFT III. SWIFT IV is a very incremental evolution, but it is a little bit different structure in the fact that we‟re dividing SWIFT IV under a shared IQC ceiling. So the $2.5 billion is shared across the full IQC into two sub IQCs. The sub IQCs were being developed on a regional basis;

there is a sub IQC-A that will cover Africa, Latin America and the

Caribbean. There will be a sub IQC-B that will cover Asia, the

Middle East and Europe and Eurasia. And I think I attached the list of countries to the FedBizOpps. The solicitation, in part, was an annex, but North Africa is part of Middle East and we‟re doing that based upon how State Department and USAID divide the world.

Finally, there is this partial small business set-aside included in

SWIFT IV. This is just the same way as it is in SWIFT III and SWIFT

II. There will be at least one small business set-aside under each sub IQCs.

The Scope: It is a pretty simple Scope of Work with a lot of detail added in and you can see the complexity of the places we work. But we try to keep the Scope simple. There are two real components. The first is to implement and manage activities from our Transition

Activities Pool. I‟ll define what that is in a second. That‟s basically the activities that we do on the ground. This is probably

95 percent or more of the work that we do in the countries where we have programming.

The second piece is support to non-direct hire USAID employees; and we‟ll get to that and explain why we have that piece built in.

Primarily it is because the places work, we‟re not sure that there‟s going to be a mission or an embassy or centers sort of set up that we would have in those countries; where USAID works or where the US

Government has presence.

The TAP: What is the TAP? There are four main components. Grants

Under Contract: Our Grants under Contract mechanism, I‟m sure you all have seen it; essentially it means that we have the ability to do lots of small grants through our SWIFT task orders. Right?

Primarily we‟re doing that In-Kind. Why do we do it In-Kind? In-

Kind is because we work in places where there typically are not a lot of established partners that are formal partners that we can work with. And possibly and most likely, those partners are not the best people to work with to affect the kinds of changes we‟re working on.

We work with lots of informal small groups that are out in rural areas that maybe haven‟t received USAID funding before, haven‟t received any donor funding before and so we do In-Kind. We do expect our partners to have the systems in place to procure In-Kind goods and services to support those grant activities.

So most of our activities are In-Kind. We also do some cash grants.

It‟s not that we don‟t do cash grants; if they make sense, they make sense so we do them. But primarily, say normally 85 to 90 percent of our grants and our contracts are In-Kind. They are small, about

$40,000 average is the cost of our programs right now.

The second piece of our Transition Activities‟ Pool (TAP) is the

Short Term Technical Assistance (STTA). We do short term technical assistance underneath our In-Kind grants. Our STTA could be part of our support In-Kind. However, there are cases were there isn‟t an obvious grantee, or there isn‟t an obvious sort of support for one grantee to support their activities. And so we might have STTA to support a wide range of things. To give an example, I think, in

Libya recently we had an STTA to do media systems. They are helping multiple small organizations that are receiving assistance on how to work with media and how to improve their abilities to work with media, how to get their messaging out. That STTA isn‟t for one specific grantee. There is no group who can actually receive that, so we do STTA.

Direct Distribution of Good and Services (DDGS). Now this is a long word for saying buying stuff or buying services and distributing directly. This is the term we sort of came up with contractually, but it‟s just buying stuff. In this case there is not -- usually in an In-Kind grant we would buy those goods and services under an In-

Kind grant. Again, sometimes there is not a direct grantee or there isn‟t -- we can‟t identify that one grantee who is the beneficiary so we‟ll do direct distribution of goods and services.

One of the examples that led us to having the TAP and led us to including DDGS in our TAP was in distributing peace dividends in

Africa, in one of the countries we were in. They had bicycles that were given to people who were demobilized, part of the package that the Government was giving out. There wasn‟t one grantee. Those ten thousand bicycles were distributed to ten thousand people. We didn‟t want to have ten thousand grants for one bicycle as part of the package of goods and services. So we procured those goods and services and distributed those directly to people.

And then training: Finally, we have had programs in the past where we used to have training programs -- big training programs not specific to one grantee -- where we asked our partners, our SWIFT partners or any other kind of partner, to put together a training program that was done countrywide. So it didn‟t have a direct beneficiary for a grant under contract, but it supported the goals and objectives of that country program.

So what does implement and manage the TAP mean? It means that OTI --and I think we‟ve talked about this already -- it‟s a one-team approach, but OTI drives the program strategy. One thing that‟s different about, I think, the way OTI does it is we take responsibility for the results that we generate. We have our program objectives. Those objectives can change, but we‟re going to take the hit if we do the wrong kind of stuff. So you‟re a partner in this, but we‟re not going to put together -- if you look in our typical programs, we don‟t give you all a task score that says you must build a hundred widgets and if you don‟t build your hundred widgets, this program has been a failure.